• When the pandemic hit, Jeremy Fleming, owner of live events company Stage Kings, was forced to stand down his entire staff overnight.
• Determined to keep his business going, Fleming reached out to his network spanning the global live music sector.
• “The resilience and adaptability of the event industry is kind of the mindset that we had… to do this pivot,” Fleming said.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

When the live music industry was shut down at the start of the pandemic, the owner of events company Stage Kings, Jeremy Fleming, was forced to stand down his entire staff.

The company he built over six years, which builds sets for live events — and has worked with massive acts like The Hilltop Hoods, Florence and the Machine, and Robbie Williams — was placed in the unenviable position of so many businesses in 2020.

“We would build structures like the pop-up Globe theatre, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo; we did a replica of the Edinburgh Castle in Sydney, that was pretty cool,” Fleming told Business Insider Australia.

Having started out in the industry building sets for dance parties and electronic music festivals, the company quickly expanded to creating stages for major local and international names.

Then, along with the rest of the industry, the stage went dark overnight.

Fleming said literally the next day he and the rest of the leadership team were on the phone with their suppliers and clients, gaming out their next move to keep the business afloat.

Why?

Because if there’s a sector conditioned to rebound from disaster, it’s the live music industry.

“I often say the resilience and adaptability of the event industry is kind of the mindset that we had… to do this pivot,” Fleming said.

In an industry where cancellations, threat of poor weather and unforeseen changes are the rule rather than the exception, Fleming says working in this space is an ideal training ground for finding new opportunities on a moment’s notice.

“The industry as a whole is always working out problems and problem-solving,” he said.

“We’re never doing the same thing twice. We might be building a replica of a castle one day and then a 30-metre high robot the next day.

“We always need to look at different ways of doing things.”

‘We went down a couple of rabbit holes’

Less than a week after the industry was shut down and lockdowns began on March 13, Fleming said he and his team had already gone down at least one path to nowhere.

“Over that next week we were talking to a lot of people trying to find ideas, basically.”

“We went down a couple of rabbit holes,” Fleming said, “we fully designed these waiting rooms for COVID testing facilities that could pop up in car parks.”

“We went a long way down that track,” he said, before the team eventually gave up on it.

He said the fact that in the music industry, which is relatively small worldwide, and where “everyone’s worked for everyone,” helped him explore more than one avenue, and led to the unexpected final solution building — wait for it — standing desks.

“I was talking to one of the guys in Europe who had worked for us here who said ‘look we’re considering making some furniture… why don’t you do something like that?'”

The team, now working from home, were already chatting about their experiences visiting Officeworks to set up home offices and finding the shelves empty.

“There was a really big gap in the supply chain,” Fleming said. “That is what set the wheels in motion.”

The company already had a timber supply chain set up for building sets, along with the machinery required.

Fleming said that when pivoting to building their now-thriving e-commerce company, IsoKings, which sells flat pack birch furniture perfectly suited to the restrictions of lockdown life, his team approached it like they would any challenge a client might put to them.

“We actually went in thinking of it as another project,” Fleming said.

“We never said ‘ok how can we change this business?’ We went in with the mindset of, ‘ok this is another project, let’s see what we can do to keep things going.'”

‘Knowing who to pick up the phone to’

With the live events sector now getting back on its feet, though Fleming admits confidence still hasn’t recovered “because things can be shut down at the drop of a hat,” he plans to keep his new business running alongside the established events business.

The range now spans standing desks, laptop stands, bed frames, shelves and plant stands, selling to a customer base that’s more than 80% female, aged 34 or older. Fleming said he never would have guessed he would have ended up running a business so removed from his original venture.

He said the fact he was able to not only create a new company, but build a thriving business during a global pandemic is testament to the power of the events community.

“People come to us with all sorts of problems that we might not necessarily have [encountered] before, but they know that we know the people that can do things.”

“That’s what that network’s all about: knowing who to pick up the phone to.

“That network of people is what’s got us where we are.”

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